From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus pages:

“About 30 students at Duke University spent a recent weekend watching YouTube clips and Twittering about them.

…..

Negar Mottahedeh, an assistant professor of literature at Duke who teaches the introductory film class, assigned the film festival as a final group project. It complemented other social-media elements in her course, including asking students to post weekly papers on blogs for comment from classmates; assembling Wikis of movie-term definitions; and allowing students to use Twitter during lectures to discuss the material.”

How do you feel about he use of social media in the classroom? Does it have a place in Teacher Education?  In the K-12 classroom?  Earlier this semester, the Center helped set up a private, password protected UStream.tv Channel for a doctoral student in CEP940 that could not travel because of a significant leg injury.  For 4 weeks, a camera and laptop were used to feed the video and audio of the class via UStream to the student in Holland, Michigan.  The student participated in the discussion via the built in chat feature of Ustream and using Today’s Meet, which is a single event Twitter-like micro-blogging tool.  Could tools like this be used for regular distance education participation?  In years past, this kind of participation would have only been available through videoconferencing at a remote site that the student would have to travel to and at a significant cost.  Now with high speed Internet available in many areas, there is the possibility that UStream.tv, Skype and back channel tools like Today’s Meet can be used to expand the reach of distance education programs.